Comments on: Can You Patent The Idea of Recommending Contacts in a Social Network?

By: Adil

Adil — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

Can someone outside from america can register for any patent ?

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

By recommending that people go to the PeerToPatent site, you seem to be infringing on the idea of this patent. Or would you still be able to patent this variation on the idea because you're using it for a different purpose?

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I was just trying to be funny- it occurred to me that you were trying to "make a connection" kind of like the patent idea you were telling us about. I have looked at PeerToPatent from time to time and hope it becomes a permanent part of the patent vetting process, as long as we seem to have to put up with software and business method patents.

By: rnjohnson

rnjohnson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:58 +0000

I'm no attorney, but I seem to remember that for something to be patentable is must be non-obvious from prior art to a person ordinarily skilled in the industry. Surely the step from having a list of friends to recommending a list of friends doesn't pass the non-obvious requirement, right?

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Aha! My sarcasm / humor filter wasn’t working this early in the morning.

By: Merredith

Merredith — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Is it just me, or does it sound a bit like Microsoft could be tippy-toeing around Amazon's recommendation engine? And the whole question of whether and how business methods are patentable is being reviewed by the Supreme Court at the moment in In re Bilski — that decision should be handed down any day now, too.

Maybe we just sit back and let them complicate and then un-complicate things, like a yo-yo…

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

Surely! But that doesn’t stop the patent filing from happening, the USPTO from spending time on it, and the possibility of a patent actually getting issued.

By: lou_paglia

lou_paglia — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

This is a joke. LinkedIn has been doing this for years, recommending contacts that may be related to you, allowing users to upload contact lists so that you can connect and connect to recommended contacts. Their entire business is based on it. Now Peer-to-Patent, social networking on patent data, that has merit.

Now I know why you snark at patent questions and issues. This is up there with patenting one-click capability.

By: bfeld

bfeld — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

I don’t understand what you mean by “infringing on the idea of this patent.” The PeerToPatent site is a public patent review site that is sponsored by the USPTO. It’s an experiment to see how “public commenting on patent applications” works.

By: Bill Mosby

Bill Mosby — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:55:54 +0000

I think it may be possible to have a "good" software patent or business method patent, but many existing ones have documented prior art that the PTO was not in a position to find. On the other hand, software production is all about imagination and creation, as opposed to the production of more "concrete" things on which there are many more real-world constraints. So it's very easy for a programmer to generate what looks like a unique solution to a problem; so easy that others likely have done so before and will again without telling anybody. More like creating literature than a physical widget. So I think the courts should just opt us out of all that complication and uncertainty and take us back to the thrilling days of yesteryear when a copyright was the best we could hope for. At least the consequences of the inevitable random "infringement" were somewhat lower.